Publics are far from constituting a monolithic ensemble, an obedient army marching in good order. The nature of their concerns allows defining at least three types of publics. First there are political publics, which could be called following Dewey’s model “issue driven” publics. Political publics are flanked on one side by taste publics or aesthetic publics, which are oriented towards “texts” or “performances.” They are flanked on the other side, by recognition seeking publics for whom the dimension of visibility tends to be a major goal (Dayan 2005, Ehrenberg 2008). “Recognition seeking publics” (such as those of soccer or popular music) use their involvement with games or performances in order to endow themselves with visible identities. They can easily turn into political publics

Aesthetic publics (the reading publics of literature, the active publics of theater, the connoisseur publics of music and the arts) have always been singled out as exemplary by theorists of the public sphere, and by Habermas in particular. Yet, despite this ostensible privilege, aesthetic publics have been often ignored, or analyzed as mere training grounds for political publics. “Salons” were first celebrated, and then turned into antechambers to the streets. Interestingly the publics, which tend to be best studied, are political publics. Aesthetic publics have been often neglected. This is why approaches that pay aesthetic publics more than a lip service, approaches such as those of Goldfarb (2006) or Ikegami (2000) are so important.

Of course, the three types of publics outlined above are ideal types. We know they often overlap in reality. But, besides overlapping or “ morphing ” into each other, they share an important dimension. Publics have careers. They have biographies. They go through different stages, including birth, growth, fatigue, aging, death, and some -times resuscitation. Let us first address moments and ways in which publics fade, disappear, and become “non publics.”

A Matter of Life and Death

First of all, publics can die a natural death. They can become “non publics” because what brought them into life no longer exists or no longer attracts their attention. But we should also consider other, much less consensual possibilities: termination or suicide.

Publics can disappear because they have been made invisible. Sometimes there is no public to observe because a given public was denied visibility. The media who could have served as midwives turned abortionists. Potential publics went down the drain of unrealized destinies. They became “non publics” because they are made invisible, because they were terminated.

Publics can also disappear because they stopped being visible on their own; because they chose to become invisible. Instead of opting for Hirschman’s “voice” they faked “ loyalty.” They turned into “marrano” publics. They were not made invisible by others. Like Harry Potter, they chose to wear a mantle of invisibility (Dayan, 2005, Noelle Neuman I989). They were intimidated.

Most of the “non publics” discussed here tend to be publics that used to exist and exist no longer. But the temporality of  “non publics ” also includes “not yet publics,” publics that exist potentially, linger in the limbos waiting to be born. Such publics –like Sleeping Beauty – seem to be awaiting the prince charming (be it a text or an event or a conjuncture). Are they passively waiting for the kiss of life?

No. Goldfarb shows that these publics-in-the-making are far from being amorphous or idle. They not only rehearse their parts, but already enact them in improvised venues: around kitchen tables, in cinematheques, in bookstores or experimental theaters. Waiting for a chance to step on the public stage, they strike the observer by their degree of readiness. The Politics of Small Things allowed them to survive and invent substitutes to a healthy public sphere (Goldfarb 2006).

But there is yet another form of “non public.” This is what we call an “ audience.“ Such a statement calls of course for some explanation.

Full Publics, Almost Publics and Non Publics: The Question of Audiences

Publics in general can be defined in terms of the social production of shared attention. The focus of collective attention generates a variety of attentive, reactive or responsive, “bodies,” such as publics, audiences, witnesses, activists, bystanders and many others. Among such “bodies” two deserve special attention, since, in many ways, they are constructed as antonyms. “Publics“ and “audiences ” enact different roles in the economy of social attention. They also differ in relation to the autonomous or heteronomous nature of their visibility.

Publics are generally conceived as mere providers of attention, as responding bodies, as willing or unwilling resources from which seekers of collective attention will be able to help themselves. Yet publics are not always mere providers of attention. Some publics are themselves calling for attention and trying to control it. They are architects of attention, organizing the attention of other publics (towards the issues they promote).

Many publics have thus something in common with “active minorities” à la Moscovici. They purposefully act as “opinion leaders” on a large scale. Like the media, and before the media, they are providers of visibility, agents of deliberate “monstration“ (Dayan 2009). These are ”full” publics. In comparison to these full publics, audiences, no matter how active, are still confined to the reception end of communicative processes.

The question of attention is linked to the question of visibility. “Full“ publics not only offer attention, they require attention. They need other publics watching them perform. They are eager to be watched. They strike a pose. Their performance may be polemic or consensual. It cannot be invisible. Such publics must “go public” or they stop being publics. Not so for audiences. Audiences often remain invisible until various research strategies quantify, qualify, materialize, their attention. For audiences to become visible, one often needs the goggles of various methodologies (Dayan 2005).

Thus, if we use public as a generic term, and if we choose visibility as the relevant criterion, one can speak of two sorts of publics. The first sort, “full” publics, is performing out in the open. It is a collective whose nature requires the dimension of visibility. In appropriating a famous Barthes’ phrase, one could speak of “obvious“ publics. No matter how intellectually active, the second sort (“audiences”) is not publicly performing. Its habitat is the private sphere. In public terms, audiences remains invisible, unless they are made visible, materialized, conjured up as in a séance that would use statistics instead of a Ouija board. In reference to Barthes (I970) I would define “audiences” as “obtuse” publics (Dayan 2005).

Of course, one should not forget that “obvious publics“ and less obvious ones are often composed of the same people. Publics easily become audiences and vice versa. They are not separated by some conceptual iron curtain. If separated, they are separated in Goffmanian fashion. They are separated by a stage curtain; the curtain that separates public performance (“full” publics) from non performance (“almost publics”, “audiences”) (Dayan 2005). In the political domain, “audiences” become “publics” when their concern for an issue prevails over their engagement with the narrative that raised it and triggers public commitment. I suggest that it is this “coming out” in public that constitutes an audience into a full public. And of course, the same “full” public can revert to the status of a mere audience, whenever unconcerned by the issue at hand.

Audiences have been described here as “almost publics,” “obtuse publics” or “non performing publics.” Audiences seem to provide us with an interesting example of “non publics.” Yet it seems more constructive to describe them as another form of public. After all, in many languages, “public” is a generic word, covering all sorts of social bodies that provide collective attention, including what is generally understood by “audience” (Dayan 2005, Livingstone 2005).

A Genealogical View of Publics: Personae Fictae, Discursive Beings, Observable Realities

Speaking of “non-publics” presupposes of course an ontology of publics. Publics are at once discursive constructions and social realities. Must we choose?

For Schlegel, “public“ was not a thing but a thought, a postulate, “like church.” A similar awareness of possible reification is expressed by literary historian Hélène Merlin (Merlin I994), for whom the public is a “persona ficta,” a fictive being. Of course church- or, more precisely, the unity of church- is indeed a postulate. But any sociologist would point out that church is also an organized body, a political power, and an economic institution. Ambivalence concerning the reality of publics, or as it was put recently; “the real world of audiences” lingers to this day (Hartley I988, Sorlin I992).

Yet, following Hartley’s insight, it seems clear that – simultaneously, or at different times – publics do belong in Popper’s three universes: 1.) Publics are notions, ideations, or – as Schegel puts it – “postulates;” 2.) Publics also offer specific registers of action and specific kinds of subjective experiences; 3.) Publics finally constitute sociological realities that one can observe, visit or measure. Thus we might view publics as a process combining both (1) a persona ficta; (2) the enactment of that fiction; (3) resulting in an observable form of sociation. What this sequence suggests is the essential role played by the “persona ficta,” the “imagined public, “ when it comes to generating actual publics (Dayan 2005).

A public is a collective subject that emerges in response to certain fictions. Thus, as John Peters remarked a-propos Habermas’ 18th century, publics emerge through reading and discussing newspapers, where the notion of “public” is being discussed (Peters 1993). Observable realities are born from intellectual constructions. A given “persona ficta” serves as a model for an observable sociation. What is suggested here is that the observable realities differ, because the constructions that begot them also differ.

In the situation described by Peters, “public” belongs to the category of collective subjects that are imagined in the first person, by a “we.“ “Public” is then one example, among many, of “imagined communities,” the most famous of which is of course the “nation“ (Nothing surprising in this, since Anderson‘s “nations” are essentially institutionalizations of reading publics). But publics are not always imagined in the first person. Only “obvious“ publics result from autonomous processes of imagination.

In the case of other publics, imagination relies on heteronomous processes. The adopted fiction is often created by outside observers. No less than autonomous processes, heteronomous ones lead to observable realities. But they do not lead to the same realities. Different sorts of “publics” can indeed be referred to the professional bodies that produced them and to the professional or lay uses they allow.

Thus the audiences of quantitative research could be described as the result of a demographic imagination. They are the version of publics that demographers construct. Similarly, meaning-making audiences could be described as semioticians’ publics. They are produced by reception scholars either for academic purposes (extending to the speech of readers a know-how gained in the analysis of texts) or for ideological purposes (rebutting Adorno’s “great divide” and redeeming the” popular”).

Both result in observable facts. Yet a demographer’s audience and a semiotician’s audience are quite different from each other. An empirical object that consists in being counted is not the same as one that consists in being listened to. When demographers look at publics, they see age groups or classes. When semioticians look at publics, they see interpretive communities.

A last point concerning the type of public so far described as “obvious” or as “autonomous.“ It seems to be produced by the members of the public themselves, and, up to a point, it is. But of course this sort of public is also modeled by the narratives of journalism, since, beyond the publishing of polls, a large part of the journalistic production consists in what one could call “publi-graphy,“ the chronicling of publics. In a way – whether political or cultural – autonomous publics are only autonomous up to a point. They are also children of journalistic imagination.

What this genealogical analysis means is that different varieties of publics are born in the eyes of their observers. It is therefore essential to closely watch those who watch publics. Who is interested in publics? The question of “who? “ translates into the question of “why?” Why should this or that “persona ficta” be conceived at all? What purposes does it serve? Publics often start their careers as a glint in the eye of social observers.

NOTES

This text represents my attempt at summarizing a few former essays on Publics. These essays are listed in the bibliography.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

* Barthes, Roland (I97O ). “ le Troisième Sens. Réflexion sur quelques photogrammes d’ Eisenstein “. Cahiers du du Cinéma. Juillet I97O

* Callon, M. ( 2002 ) “ Lay scientists and Medical Publics “ Oral communication. * Autour de la notion de Public. Symposium “ Connaissance et Culture”. Université de Paris X Nanterre.. Dec 2, 2002

* Dayan, D ( I992 ) ” Les Mystéres de la Réception. ” Le Débat. n° I7. Paris Gallimard I44: I62

* Dayan, D ( I998 ) “ Le Double Corps du Spectateur : Vers une définition processuelle de la notion de public, Serge Proulx. ed Accusé de Réception.: Le Téléspectateur construit par les Sciences Sociales. Québec, Presses de l’université de Laval

* Dayan, D ( 2001) “ The Peculiar Public of Television “. Media, Culture & Society. London, Sage, vol 23, N° 6 November 2001.743-765

* D ayan, D (2005) “Paying Attention to Attention : Audiences, Publics, Thresholds & Genealogies “. Media practice” 6.1

* Dayan, D (2005) “Mothers, Midwives and Abortionists “ In Sonia Livingstone, ed. Audiences and Publics, London, Intellect press.

° Dayan, D, E Katz & Mario Mesquita (2003) Televisao, Publicos. Coimbra

* Dayan,D & E Katz (2011) Preface to Luckerhoff,J.and D. Jacobi Looking for Non-Publics. Montreal, Quebec University Press ””

* Fiske, J. ( I992 ) “Audiencing : A cultural studies approach to watching television, “.Poetics : 2I (I992) 345 – 359.

* Goldfarb, Jeffrey C. (2006) The Politics of Small Things. Chicago, University of Chicago Press

* Goffman, E.( I959) The Presentation of Self in Everyday life. Garden City, NY- Doubleday.

* Hartley, J. ( I987) “Invisible Fictions, Paedocracy, Pleasure,” Textual Practice, I : 2, I21-138

* Hartley, J. ( I988) “The Real World of Audiences,” Critical Studies in Mass Communications, Sept I998. 234-:238

* Ikegami,Eiko ( 2000 ) “A Sociological Theory of Publics: Identity and Culture as Emergent Properties in Networks,” Social research 67B

* Merlin, Heléne (1994) Public et litterature en france au XVII° siécle. Paris, les Belles lettres,

* Noelle -Neuman, E. (I984) The Spiral of Silence. Public opinion, Our Social Skin, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

* Peters, John Durham ( I993 ) “Distrust of Representation: Habermas and the Public Sphere”. Media, culture and Society. I5, 4

* Schudson, Michael (I997) “Why Conversation is not the Soul of Democracy, “ Critical Studies in Mass Communication, I4(4): 297-3O9

* Sorlin, P ( I992 ) “ le Mirage du Public “ Revue d’Histoire Moderne et contemporaine 39-I992 : 86-IO2

In today’s In-Depth post, which was presented at this year’s American Sociological Association Meeting in Denver, Lisa Lipscomb extends Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz analysis of media events to the new media and the new political environment. I am struck by how the analysis of Dayan and Katz still illuminates important political developments, and also appreciate how Lipscomb extension gives a fuller understanding of media politics of our day. Their work still shows how  institutionalized democracy is significantly constituted through television. She shows how extra institutional democratic forces, contributing to what Pierre Rosanvallon describes as counter-democracy, are manifested through Digital Events of the new electronic media.

Thus, the main events of this week and last: using the insights of Dayan and Katz, it is clear that the nominating conventions are anything but empty affairs. It is true that these conventions have long ago lost their instrumental purposes: before the fact everyone knew who the candidates for president and vice president would be, and the party platforms developed and passed at the conventions are ignored by the electorate and the politicians alike. Yet, the conventions still play a very important political role, ritualistically indicating that the election contest is now entering its decisive stage, and that it is now the time for all good men and women to come to the aid of their party (to paraphrase the old typing drill).

Indeed, the nominating ritual confirms both the substantial existence and appeal of and the attachment to each of the parties. They try to refine and shape their message and appeal, and in the process, they define the terms of the American political contest and debate.  In societies of the past, such rituals occurred face to face: not only in conventions and politics, but also in processions, coronations, funerals and holidays of all sorts, reported first by word of mouth, later through the written word and the printed page. The major finding of Dayan and Katz is that since radio and television, political ritual continues through a type of broadcast, “media events,”confirming the central ideals and identities of social orders, and the competing conventional alternatives, and the alternatives to the dominant ones, as Lipscomb cogently summarizes in her piece.

But things are clearly changing. The new electronic media connect citizens in new ways. The dominance of television, which Dayan and Katz assumed when they published their book in the early 90s, is now being eroded, something that deeply concerns Katz. He is not sure that the new media environment supports a common public world, a free public life necessary for democracy. He fears that fragmentation of public orders challenge democratic practice. His are real and important concerns. I applaud this former collaborator of Paul Lazarsfeld for continuing to probe the political consequences of media. Yet, we need to understand how new media are now constituting political subjectivity and connection.

This is what Lipscomb’s post considers by examining the formation of a global protest, “a digital media event,” the case of the video of the murder of Neda Agha Soltan at the hands of the Basij, a voluntary militia that takes its orders from Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khameini and its circulation through new media and old. She shows how a community of critical capacity comes to be formed, a most important development in the times of the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street and other new “new social movements.”

To read the full In-Depth Analysis “Digital Events: Media Rituals in the Digital Age” by Lisa Lipscomb, click here.

The woman in the video was later identified by her fiancée as Neda Agha Soltan. Neda lay dying on Kargar Ave. in Tehran, Iran Saturday June 20, 2009 during a post-election protest, allegedly shot in the chest by a member of the Basij, a voluntary militia that takes its orders from Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khameini. Using a cell phone, an anonymous bystander digitally captured the moments just after Neda was shot. According to news reports, the author of the video then contacted a virtual friend he had met through Facebook who lived in the Netherlands, and asked him to post the footage. The virtual friend, known only by his first name, Hamed, uploaded the footage to the Internet and sent copies to the BBC and The Guardian as well as other media outlets. Within hours, two distinct clips surfaced on Facebook and YouTube. Shortly thereafter, the video was broadcast by CNN, thus making “Neda” a household name (Langendonck, NRC Handelsblad, 2009).

Today, I am here to talk about how mobile and social media fit in to the ongoing discussions about media’s influence on public life. I am going to make this argument in three parts. First, by offering a brief overview of Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz’s concept of the “media event,” as outlined in their book of the same name, and more recent additions and amendments to this theory. I will then define what I call the “digital event” by looking at the capture, distribution and reaction to the Neda video. Finally, by examining the online and face-to-face response to the video, I hope to persuade you that the Internet and mobile media are able to bring about public awareness, elicit ritualized response online and in the streets, and therefore, recreate the sacred through bringing together publics in the same way that media events have.

Dayan and Katz defined a certain format of television programming, which they believed provide the public with a new way of attending a ceremony. The authors describe how a “media event” brings people together to participate in a historic, political or social occasion that takes the form of a televisual ceremony. Dayan and Katz identified three types of media events: the contest, the conquest and the coronation. Some examples of these include the Olympic games, Presidential elections, religious pilgrimages, space exploration and state weddings and funerals. Media events are unique in that, “they are, by definition, not routine. In fact, they are interruptions of routine; they intervene in the normal flow of broadcasting and our lives” (Dayan and Katz, 1992, p. 5). Most often, numerous stations broadcast the event simultaneously, nationally and/or internationally, without interruption, thus monopolizing the airwaves for the duration of the event. According to Dayan and Katz, the broadcast takeover facilitates the creation of a unifying experience and ultimately an arena of sacred space (Dayan and Katz, 1992, p. 89). Furthermore, the time-sensitive nature of the event functions to unite the public – those watching at home and those who are in attendance – and share the experience of witnessing a historic moment. Media events manipulate space and time, keeping the viewer far, but also near. The medium is able to bring outsiders in to an event of great social, historical or political importance. Even though the television viewer is not physically in attendance at the event, they participate almost as fully. In fact, the viewer at home is given the advantage of an unobstructed view and voice-over narration that is not offered for those in attendance.

The media event is a highly structured and delineated process. The ceremony or ritual is planned, scripted and often times rehearsed. It requires the cooperation and collaboration of many different people and agencies including broadcasters, event organizers, the event audience, the viewer at home and many times, the state. Additionally, the media event oftentimes relies on tradition to dictate how the event is presented, for example, in the case of a state wedding or funeral. Since agents outside the media and the television studio organize media events, the role of the medium is to provide the channel for transmission. Here, the format promotes public unification and community through ritual, tradition and celebration.

Media scholars have pointed out that the media event does not account for disruptions or conflict; for example, terrorist events, natural disaster coverage or the spectacle of war (Couldry, 2003; Cottle, 2006). “Media Events” was published before 9/11 and the global “War on Terror” and more recent theories have addressed this issue, updating and expanding upon the concept of the media event. Katz himself later argues that, “media events of the ceremonial kind seem to be receding in importance, maybe even in frequency, while the live broadcasting of disruptive events such as disaster, terror and war are taking center stage” (Couldry, 2010: 33). As I come to defining my notion of the “digital event,” I see it situated within the contextual framework of Simon Cottle’s concept of “mediatized rituals.” Cottle (2006) defines mediatized rituals as “those exceptional and performative media phenomena that serve to sustain and/or mobilize collective sentiments and solidarities on the basis of symbolization and a subjunctive orientation to what should or ought to be” (p. 415). He then sub-categorizes mediatized rituals into six theoretical arguments: moral panics; celebrated ‘media events’; contested ‘media events’; media disasters; mediated scandals and mediatized public crises. As we see it, Dayan and Katz’s concept is subsumed into the category of celebrated media events. On the other hand, digital events do not fit nicely into one of these categories. Since I am relating the notion of the “digital event” to the specific mode of communication, the theoretical approach can differ depending on the situation. The Neda video could be described as a “media disaster” and a “mediatized public crisis.”

Neda’s death itself, while certainly an event, is only a portion of the narrative of this “digital event.” In this situation, I see the digital event beginning when the witness started recording the situation. After he finishes recording, he pursues making the situation public by sending the footage to a friend who is able to upload it to the Internet and distribute it to news sources. Once public, there is an outpouring of reaction from online viewers, which takes the form of ritualized digital mourning and the reproduction, reposting, forwarding and linking of the video. Those that took to the streets after her death carried the image of her bloody face printed on posters and flyers.

The digital event is digital because many of its major components take place in or are facilitated by digital media, which includes mobile media like cell phones, or digital space, including the Internet and social networking websites. Time is the obsession of television whereas space is the obsession of digital media. Space in terms of location and geography and space in terms of capacity, capacity for memory: storing, archiving, uploading, sharing, remembering. Raymond Williams’ (1974) concept of “flow” is inevitably linked to discussions about the temporal nature of television. According to Williams, “This phenomenon of planned flow, is then perhaps the defining characteristics of broadcasting, simultaneously as a technology and as a cultural form” (p. 86). Televisual flow consists of the totality of television’s contents: news programs, documentary shows, narrative programming, etc. It has been repeated many times over that people watch television, not shows or programs. When it comes to event programming, for instance, Dayan & Katz’s “media events,” flow is interrupted. Mary Ann Doane (1990) argues that we can identify media events as such when the referent becomes indistinguishable from the medium (p. 222). Alternatively, the digital event is timely, but does not interrupt flow. In the case of the Neda video, once the mainstream media picked up the footage, they packaged and delivered it to the audience in the format of a crisis (Doane, 1990). However, the ritualized public response came as a result of the video’s digital presence and the interactions protestors and supporters were having online and in the streets.

Many actors are responsible for the success of the media event, which is also true for the digital event. Both digital and media events situate the audience in a participatory role. Granting regard in the form of attendance or visual participation establishes the media event as legitimate. Examining the technology or medium used is one way of understanding the medium’s unique characteristics and social capacities. As we have seen, the media event demands a passive audience. Although McLuhan described television as a “cool, low-definition” medium that requires the viewer to extract the meaning from a program, this is clearly not the case with media events as meaning is predetermined and calls on cultural scripts familiar to the viewer. In the case of the Neda video, the cell phone was used as an instrument of witnessing. Protestors had been recording the extreme violence on the streets from the start of the protests. Pictures and videos uploaded to YouTube, Twitter and Facebook show protesters holding their phones in the air recording what was taking place with hopes that others would also see. The digital event requires a high level of participation at every level or phase of the event. Citizen journalism was responsible for the publicity of the Neda video as well as the millions of viewers on YouTube, Twitter and Facebook that eventually took to the streets in memory and protest. July 25, 2009 was declared A Global Day of Action in Paris and a hundred other cities around the world. National Geographic photographer Reza printed 500 masks of a portrait of Neda and had protestors sit in front of the Eifel Tower for a photograph.

One of the distinguishing features of a digital event is that it does not require event organizers, pre-planning or scripting. The video of Neda was recorded and distributed by two individuals and did not require the mainstream media in order for it to gain widespread attention. However, the Neda video did eventually become subsumed into the mainstream media and was played unedited on many networks. In Iran, the media is controlled by the state; however, the Internet is proving to be problematic for the government. Despite government restrictions, what is happening on in the streets of Iran is being made visible around the world by way of digital media as well as mobilizing publics in the name of ritual protest online and in the streets. Neda’s death represented some of the fundamental injustices that brought the protestors out to the streets in the first place.

The digital event takes place everywhere and nowhere. In this case, Neda’s death was only witnessed in person by a handful of people. The cell phone provided a portal to a time, place and situation that would not have otherwise been available. Spatial boundaries became fluid; those outside Iran and unconnected to the protests became witnesses with the capacity to react and respond. In fact, the video was more accessible to those outside of Iran where there are less government restrictions regarding the media and the Internet. In large part, those outside Iran came to learn about Neda through YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. The mass media referred to the post-election protests as the “Twitter Revolution” and the “Facebook Revolution” in that each of these social networking sites was instrumental in bringing attention to and mobilizing those participating in the opposition movement. Additionally, the U.S. State Department urged Twitter not to push out a scheduled update because it would interrupt service and the events in Iran were tied to Twitter as a source of information and communication in a nation notorious for censorship.

During the height of the protests, those in the U.S. and other countries outside of Iran were changing their location on Twitter to Tehran, Iran in order to confuse the Iranian government, who many believed were targeting and performing online surveillance on election protestors. When someone creates a profile on Twitter, they can specify their location by choosing a time zone, which then appears on their Twitter profile page. Those who believed the Iranian government was targeting protestors through Twitter thought that it would be harder to track down the real protestors if everyone was declaring Tehran as their location. One individual using the name FORIRAN2009 tweeted, “Change timezone to Tehran – Disrupt Basiji (secret police) from tracking iranians.” Those not initially connected with the election or even every having any previous interest in Iran showed solidarity for the protestors after viewing the Neda video. In the days and weeks after her death, digital mourners continued to post links to the Neda video and also created slideshow and montage Neda tributes, wrote poems and songs in her honor, posted messages and changed their profile images to read “Where is THEIR Vote,” a reworking of the phrase “Where is MY Vote” that was being used by Iranian protestors. A user going by the name “Green4Iran” tweeted, “People in Iran: Shoot as many videos as you can and upload it. World is watching. Make sure the date well noted!”

AngelaChenShui tweeted, “VERY Graphic RT See 4 yourself the creation of a martyr http://bit.ly/9PVfO #iranelection #gr88 #Mousavi #mousavi1388 #Pray #Prayer #Freedom.”

Jonap tweeted, “Will Neda’s death be the rallying cry that Mousavi could not possibly be? #iranelection #neda.”

Rootvetwife tweeted, “RT They murdered #neda, but not her voice: http://bit.ly/14cX6p #iranelection.”

Inspiredkk tweeted, “#Neda in the hearts of the world. The most beautiful martyr in history. Shame on the mulahs, shame on the government. Neda lives…”

These and many similar messages were posted on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube over the days and weeks following Neda’s death. In response to her death, groups on Facebook were calling for her nomination as Time Magazine’s “Woman of the Year.” In 2010, a documentary called “For Neda” was released and is available for viewing in its entirety on YouTube. To this day people continue to mourn, ritualize and honor her as a martyr.

Neda’s death and the image of her dying gaze were instrumental in creating a thread of solidarity and collective mourning for protestors online and in the streets. The decision to look, to witness, to grant regard, to capture and archive and then make visible to a wider public no longer requires the massive collaboration of broadcasters, event organizers or the state. Dayan and Katz demonstrated that the sorts of ritual practices Durkheim studied are observable in the televisual age. I have tried to demonstrate that such practices are alive and well in the ritual dimension of the digital.

Gilad Shalit is home today, after five years and four months as a captive of Hamas. My initial reaction, as an Israeli, reflecting on these developments in Berlin, looking mostly at Israeli written press online: I think it is wonderful that Shalit’s mental and physical condition is good enough for him to be able to appreciate his return.

As for the “home” he will find, others have written about the Israeli society he left in contrast with the one to which he returns. I wish instead to comment on two significant symbolic questions: Was the “price” paid for his return justified? And, the more difficult question which requires the help of a philosopher to address: what is the nature and meaning of his homecoming?

The first issue concerning the “price” paid for the safe return of a soldier seems to me and to most of the Israeli public as a no- brainer: one has to save the life of a soldier sent in one’s name.  This issue has been covered in the German press I follow in Berlin, praising the commitment of the Israelis to their own people. However, the Israeli press’ apparent need to declare Hamas inhuman concerns me.

I am happy that Shalit is healthy, and recognize that the call in the Palestinian street today to capture other “Shalits” so that other prisoners will be released is obviously morally wrong. Yet, the parallel Israeli use of “price tag” to refer to the urge to hurt Palestinians, as well as the attacks upon what is conceived as the memory of left wing and secular Israel, specifically focused upon the Rabin Assassination, are no less morally wrong.

The attacks, about which Vered Vinitzky Seroussi has extensively written, seem to appear at moments of peaceful interaction and are deeply problematic. Last week, graffiti on the memorial site read: “free Yigal Amir” [Rabin’s assassin]. Perhaps the positive lesson from the discourse on “prices” is that it cannot be read in a vacuum: talking about costs involves agents, past and present, besides its seemingly benign metaphoric suggestion of the economy of life and death.

On the nature of the homecoming and its meaning: the first thing to note is the orchestrated take-over of Shalit by the state of Israel, which manifested itself, as was expected, in the swap of Shalit from the Hamas to the hands of the Egyptian state, and from Egypt to the Israeli state (the army was the first to greet him and dress him in uniform) and only then back to his family. It was significant that Shalit, the 25-year old captive soldier, wore his uniform and saluted Prime Minister Netanyahu, Security Minister Ehud Barak and the Chief of Staff upon his return, as he did. The Israeli collective partook in the state ceremony, in consuming the constant news reporting: flying flags and slogans greeting the returning soldier, and playing songs on radio, some were written for the occasion. Motti Neiger in a short Facebook status update suggested all this is proof that the Israeli media is used first and foremost for maintaining the cohesion of the Israeli collective. It was a classic media event in the sense of Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz. It made things expected, almost already rehearsed and habituated, like any other ritual, combining a memorial ceremony with holiday festivities.

But the return of specific young man, Gilad Shalit’s homecoming, his return to his family, reveals complexity and perhaps hope, beyond the meaning of the official ceremony.

In a short article published in March of 1945 in the American Journal of Sociology entitled “The Homecomer,” the phenomenologist Alfred Schutz wrote that the homecomer differs from the stranger in that he returns to a place that used to be his home, yet, it cannot be the home he left. Schutz reflected on returning veterans of WWII, but one cannot help but think of the relevance to his personal history, a German émigré scholar in America, who was forced to leave home in Europe for political and ethnic reasons and could never find the home he left behind.  Merging dimensions of time and space, Schutz writes: “home is a starting point as well as a terminus.”

Two year ago, Shalit’s father, Noam, took the Israeli flag off the roof of his house, demonstrating against what he saw as the lack of action to return his son. A few days ago, he was photographed flying the flag again, after the decision to return his son home in a swap for 1027 Palestinians accused in terrorist action and kept in Israeli jails. Shalit, the father, signified the key symbol of the starting point and terminus of home: the flag on the roof. More, we learned that its mere existence is not enough—it had to be removed and re-placed.

Life at home means intimacy and familiarity. Upon his return, PM Netanyahu greeted Shalit with a citation from an old, well known song: it is so good to have you back home.  To his parents he said: I returned the boy back home. This tension between the public homecoming (the song refers to a traveler returning home) and the homecoming of the child to his parents was no small part of the discussions of whether to “pay the price” for Shalit’s return. The other part, the national commitment to do everything to return prisoners home, played a large role in the public pressure to release Shalit, as it is one of the premises of obligatory conscription.

Yet about the young man, the homecomer himself: upon his release, Shalit told the Egyptian Press: “I am happy for the Palestinian prisoners to be released, hope that they won’t return to fight Israel. I hope that this deal will help advance peace.”

May the home he comes to find make his hope realizable.

During a stop on their ‘roadshow,’ two world renown media researchers, Elihu Katz and Paddy Scannell, treated an audience at The New School for Social Research to some current reflections on “media events” and long-term television developments. It was Katz and his co-author and DC regular Daniel Dayan,  who started exploring these events in the 1970s when the surprising trip by Egyptian president Anwar Sadat to Israel and the ensuing television coverage inspired them and the world. It was the start of their long and intensive exploration of ceremonial contests, conquests and coronations that were celebrated through live broadcasts on television, resulting in one of the defining books in the field of media studies, Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History.  Recently, Katz and Scannell, the founding editor of Media, Culture and Society, have been revisiting the phenomenon. Things have changed, but media events appear to be still with us.

A telling example: Barack Obama’s inauguration in January 2009 which drew some 37+ million viewers. This once in a lifetime happening was a quintessential “media event.” The live broadcast of the meticulously scripted ceremony brought everyday life to a temporary standstill. Reporters and the vast audience were filled with awe in their celebration of the election of the first American black president. In addition to media that offered a live-streaming of the event, TVs were still the go-to medium. Television seemed to be alive, if not completely well.

As a student and collaborator of Paul Lazarsfeld at Columbia’s Bureau of Applied Social Research, Katz for many years was skeptical about the power of media to change people’s minds.  But as a co-author with Dayan, he speaks in awe and fascination about the live images of astronauts landing on the moon, of the newly elected Polish Pope kissing his native soil, and of royal weddings and official funerals. He knows that the television broadcasts of these events were performative, with real and significant social impact.

Fast forward to the current unrest in the Middle East.  There we see typical examples of disruptive, unplanned happenings that upstage the normal flow of news bulletins and ceremonial media events. In the past 10 years or so, sudden and dramatic events have been front and center on our media screens. Think 9/11, the 2003 Iraq invasion, and Hurricane Katrina, to name just a few huge ones. Katz and Scannell wonder if these kinds of happenings can also be considered media events, or if these unscripted versions belong to another genre.

The reasons why disrupting events have become ubiquitous give some insight. The institution of television, while busy broadcasting all these ‘mediathons’ about missing children, adulterous officials, natural and manmade disasters, has changed vastly. And newer forms of media have upstaged old-fashioned television. In addition to all that, Katz and Scannell also blame cynicism and disenchantment towards both the media and governments. Can it be that these developments not only lead to the redefinition of media events, but also to the matter of how people nowadays end up celebrating their ceremonies? If we can no longer watch spectacular, live media events, together, simultaneously, experiencing a sense of belonging, how and where are we going to make up for that?

What did television do for mankind? Among other things, it gave societies an outlet to celebrate themselves, as Katz and Dayan clearly showed. Although its days are numbered, it is still a bit too early to suggest that television’s time is completely over. The inauguration of President Obama was made for television! But also for a Web audience that could follow every Obama’s movement on computer screens thanks to live streaming. And the web audience was able to respond, interact, let’s say participate, in a way that the television audience could not. But as an interactive medium, as a medium partially integrated with the web, TV has its limits. An additional problem is that CNN, FOX, MSNBC, and the like, spend most of their time airing a sheer endless onslaught of disruptive events. This doesn’t leave much room for celebration.  Admittedly, broadcasters are trying to morph tales of war and terror into instances of celebration of our freedom and democracy and others’ lack thereof. But they are not in control. Terrorists, criminals, militaries, and Mother Nature are behind the scripts of disasters. The broadcasting of them on multiple rival channels has rather disintegrated society instead of bringing people together.

The mediated celebration of national ceremonies on television may truly be in a crisis. The end of television as we know it is near. But not all is lost. A more interactive successor may very well deal with future events. And there is still the marking of modest events. Although the evening with Katz and Scannell itself did not produce many answers to the questions raised by our new media order, the show turned out to be an insightful ceremony in itself, in which the making of Media Events, i.e. the book, was celebrated. And rightfully so.